The Linux driver implementer’s API guide

The kernel offers a wide variety of interfaces to support the development of device drivers. This document is an only somewhat organized collection of some of those interfaces — it will hopefully get better over time! The available subsections can be seen below.

Table of contents

• Driver Basics
  • Driver Entry and Exit points
  • Atomic and pointer manipulation
  • Delaying, scheduling, and timer routines
  • Wait queues and Wake events
  • High-resolution timers
  • Workqueues and Kevents
  • Internal Functions
  • Kernel objects manipulation
  • Kernel utility functions
  • Device Resource Management
• Device drivers infrastructure
  • The Basic Device Driver-Model Structures
  • Device Drivers Base
  • Device Drivers DMA Management
  • Device drivers PnP support
  • Userspace IO devices
• Device Power Management
  • Device Power Management Basics
  • Suspend/Hibernation Notifiers
  • Device Power Management Data Types
• Bus-Independent Device Accesses
  • Introduction
  • Memory Mapped IO
  • Port Space Accesses
  • Public Functions Provided
• Buffer Sharing and Synchronization
  • Shared DMA Buffers
  • Reservation Objects
  • DMA Fences
• Device links
  • Usage
  • Limitations
  • Examples
  • Alternatives
  • Implementation
  • State machine
  • API
• Message-based devices
  • Fusion message devices
• Sound Devices
• Frame Buffer Library
  • Frame Buffer Memory
  • Frame Buffer Colormap
  • Frame Buffer Video Mode Database
  • Frame Buffer Macintosh Video Mode Database
  • Frame Buffer Fonts
• Voltage and current regulator API
  • Introduction
  • Consumer driver interface
  • Regulator driver interface
  • Machine interface
  • API reference
• Industrial I/O
  • Introduction
  • Core elements
  • Buffers
  • Triggers
  • Triggered Buffers
• Input Subsystem
  • Input core
  • Multitouch Library
  • Polled input devices
  • Matrix keyboards/keypads
  • Sparse keymap support
• The Linux-USB Host Side API
  • Introduction to USB on Linux
  • USB Host-Side API Model
  • USB-Standard Types
  • Host-Side Data Types and Macros
  • USB Core APIs
  • Host Controller APIs
  • The USB Filesystem (usbfs)
• Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)
• I²C and SMBus Subsystem
• High Speed Synchronous Serial Interface (HSI)
  • Introduction
  • HSI Subsystem in Linux
  • hsi-char Device
  • The kernel HSI API
• Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) Devices
  • Main Concepts used at the EDAC subsystem
  • Memory Controllers
  • PCI Controllers
  • EDAC Blocks
• Parallel Port Devices
• 16x50 UART Driver
• Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM)
• VME Device Drivers
  • Driver registration
  • Resource management
  • Master windows
  • Slave windows
  • DMA channels
  • Interrupts
  • Location monitors
  • Slot Detection
  • Bus Detection
• Linux 802.11 Driver Developer’s Guide
  • Introduction
  • cfg80211 subsystem
  • mac80211 subsystem (basics)
  • mac80211 subsystem (advanced)
• The Userspace I/O HOWTO
  • About this document
  • About UIO
  • Writing your own kernel module
  • Writing a driver in userspace
  • Generic PCI UIO driver
  • Generic Hyper-V UIO driver
  • Further information
• Linux Firmware API
  • Introduction
  • Firmware API core features
  • request_firmware API